


(and i can't keep up)

by gendernoncompliant



Category: Haven (TV)
Genre: Episode: s02e08 Friend or Faux, F/M, I just wish these characters talked about things more tbh, Missing Scene, discussion of childhood homelessness, processing trauma with a side of mutual pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-08
Updated: 2020-09-08
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:09:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,687
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26364700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gendernoncompliant/pseuds/gendernoncompliant
Summary: They’re quiet for a moment, before Audrey awkwardly bumbles her way through a murmured, “That was a good thing you did today, for Henry.”Duke keeps sweeping, but he aims something that looks suspiciously like a smile down at the floor. “Yeah, well. When I was his age, I didn’t have a choice, you know?” He says. “Kid had options. Would’ve been stupid to let him waste it.”
Relationships: Duke Crocker/Audrey Parker
Comments: 14
Kudos: 34





	(and i can't keep up)

**Author's Note:**

> I think I might start a series of short fic where it's just entirely made up of self-indulgent conversations that I desperately wish the characters would have had. These days every time I watch Haven I am just DYING for the writers to allow them to actually start/finish conversations.
> 
> Anyway, this takes place at the end of s2e08. Duke and Audrey both aired out some pretty intense shit in that episode and by god I just want them to be friends and talk to each other.
> 
> *Title from the song "High (Keep Up)" by Bo Baskoro

Audrey offers to drive Nathan home when the drunken dancing devolves into dizzily clinging to the bar with a seasick look on his face. His half-hearted attempts at arguing don’t get him very far and eventually he thunks his head down against the counter and admits defeat. He spends most of the drive with his forehead mushed up against the passenger’s side window, but he casts a few sloppy, sideways grins her direction when she teases him about his dancing.

“You need me to walk you to your door?” She asks—an offer that lands somewhere between genuine and playful.

“I got it, Parker,” he promises while he fumbles his way out of the car. She watches him make a less than straight line up his driveway with a grin on her face. Unlocking the door takes a comically long time and—once it’s finally done—he whirls around a little too quickly, staggers, rights himself, and aims her a mock salute she can’t help but laugh at. She waits until he’s actually inside the house to put the car in reverse and head back.

By the time she pulls into the drive at the Gull, the place has emptied of customers. Through the window, she can see Duke stacking chairs on tables. Audrey lets herself back inside and relishes the quiet emptiness of the place. The warm yellow light stands out like a beacon against the dark beach outside, cozy and familiar.

Home, maybe. But she’s getting ahead of herself.

“So, Nathan’s a mess,” she jokes as she makes her way inside, winding around the mop and bucket he’s left by the door.

He shakes his head with a grin. “He give you any trouble?”

“Eh.” She shrugs. “No more than usual.” She lingers in the center of the room, not quite sure if she ought to make herself comfortable or excuse herself and head upstairs. After everything that’s happened today, there’s too much _room_ left behind in the quiet of evening. Too many open ended questions neither of them is prepared to answer.

Duke busies himself with sweeping and offers a conversational, “Ah well, at least he didn’t puke this time.”

They’ve known each other a long time, Duke and Nathan. Not for the first time, she feels just a little out of step. She leans up against one of the tables. “He do this often?” She asks.

Quirking an eyebrow at her, Duke drawls, “You’ve met him.”

Audrey chuckles. “So, no.”

“Nathan Wuornos? Have fun?” He puffs a laugh through his nose. “That is a once in a blue moon event, right there.”

They’re quiet for a moment, before Audrey awkwardly bumbles her way through a murmured, “That was a good thing you did today, for Henry.”

Duke keeps sweeping, but he aims something that looks suspiciously like a smile down at the floor. “Yeah, well. When I was his age, I didn’t have a choice, you know?” He says. “Kid had options. Would’ve been stupid to let him waste it.”

When he’d brought it up the first time, they were in the middle of a case, trapped in a maze of a building with a murderer and his supernatural double. There wasn’t time to talk about it. Now, though, she murmurs, “I didn’t know you were homeless, growing up.”

With his back to her, Audrey can’t be sure what expression crosses his face. She can see his shoulders go tight, though, and she doesn’t think she imagines it.

“Well, dear old Dad kicked the bucket. And Mom had a, uh—very hands-off approach to parenting.”

He talks about it with the same easy, unaffected cadence he talks about everything—about the weather, about the produce at the farmer’s market. He gives it such a specific, calculated, hand-sculpted sort of indifference that she knows without a doubt that—whatever the specifics of the thing are—it’s an old and open wound: the kind she needs to be careful navigating around.

Tact has never exactly been her strong suit.

“I’m sorry,” she says—earnest, if a little clumsy. “That must have been really hard.”

“Eh, it is what it is.” He shrugs, casting her a look over his shoulder. “It’s no big deal.”

“You were a kid,” she insists, “It’s a big deal.” It would have been a big deal whether he was a kid or not, but what he’d said earlier in the day stuck with her—nagging at the back of her mind like a thorn in her skull: that he had been _younger_ than Henry.

Duke doesn’t answer her, but he doesn’t change the subject either.

“I’m just saying. I was an orphan,” she starts, only to come to a sudden stop. “Or—I remember being an orphan. Whatever. Anyway. Point is, yeah, the system sucks but at least I had a roof over my head, you know?” She sighs, crossing her arms tightly over her chest. “No kid should have to go through that.”

Duke paints on a smile the way he always does. She wonders if he looks that transparent to everyone or if the two of them have a kind of understanding.

“I turned out alright,” he says. He doesn’t shut down, exactly, but he turns away—like the subject is a bright light he can’t look at directly. But she doesn’t want to talk around it the way the three of them seem to talk around everything.

She’s never been the type to keep her nose out of other people’s business, either. Can’t see any reason to start now.

“How come nobody helped you?” She asks. She’s been in Haven long enough to know the way news travels in this town.

Duke abandons sweeping and leans against the counter. “I was a handful.” He plays it off like a joke, but she doesn’t find it funny.

“You were a child,” she corrects, voice firm. His face goes wide and startled in the moment before he schools his expression back into something neutral.

Staring down at his feet, Duke’s voice lacks its usual nonchalance when he mumbles, “I wouldn’t have let anyone help me, anyway.”

Her next question almost doesn’t leave her lips. It’s the harder, stranger, more loaded question. It’s the question that simultaneously matters both more and less than the first.

“Did Nathan know?”

The quiet hangs between them like a physical thing. He goes so long without answering, she starts to think he isn’t going to at all. Finally, he lets out a long, tired sigh and says, “I don’t think so. I—didn’t want him to.”

“Why not?” She asks, gentle as she knows how to be.

He stares at something halfway across the room, unwilling or unable to look her in the eye. She wonders how she could have missed this—this heaviness he’s been carrying on his shoulders for god knows how long.

“He’d have looked at me different,” Duke says. It sounds like a confession. A secret. She wonders if Duke has always been this raw just beneath the surface.

“But the Chief knew,” Audrey says, less a question than a statement.

Duke lets out a low, humorless chuckle. He pushes away from the counter to return the broom to the storage closet. “Yes,” he hums, clicking his teeth, “I’d imagine he did.”

“Jesus,” she mutters. Shaking her head, she adds a quiet, “Fuck that guy.”

Duke bubbles into a startled, genuine laugh. “Speaking ill of the dead _and_ your former employer,” he teases, sounding impressed. A little bit of the tension unspools from the room. Duke steps behind the bar to pour them both a finger of whiskey. “Now, I’ll drink to that.”

Their hands brush when he passes her the glass and they both knock it back in one go. When he takes the cup from her again, he wears a contemplative, thoughtful expression that she doesn’t like the look of.

As he moves to clean up, he asks, “Hey, what you said earlier, to the—uh, Cornells. Do you…” He gestures vaguely, searching for the right words. “Feel like a copy?”

She shrugs and finally settles at a barstool. “Doesn’t matter what I feel like,” she deflects. “I _am_ a copy of somebody. Maybe more than one somebodies.” She straightens her jacket with a sigh. “I don’t really know what I am.”

It was easy to talk a big game when it mattered—easy to tell Cornell’s double that he could live his own life, make his own choices, be his own person. It doesn’t feel so easy when she turns that logic back around on herself.

At least Cornell knew what he was.

“You’re Audrey Parker,” Duke says, sure and steady and warm.

She casts him a skeptical look. “That’s nice of you,” she drawls, “but you’ve met Audrey Parker.”

He startles her from her thoughts with a gentle hand laid across hers on the bar top.

“You,” he repeats, slow and purposeful, “are Audrey Parker.” He runs his thumb over her knuckles.

Her throat goes traitorously tight. She aims a smile down at the counter and grumbles a good-natured, “Don’t start getting sentimental on me, Crocker.”

He squeezes her fingers. “Me?” He asks, watching her with that warm, kind expression that always feels like it sees straight through her. “Never.”

"You deserved better," she says suddenly, backtracking the subject to something safer. It feels important, though, that she say it. "Somebody should have looked out for you, back then."

"Well," Duke says, his posture relaxed but his voice just a little tight. "Lucky for me I've got you in my corner, huh?"

"Yeah," she says, missing his hand on hers the moment he lets go. "Lucky."

She almost kisses him goodnight, before she leaves. Everything feels so comfortable and familiar, there’s just a fraction of a second where she forgets she isn’t supposed to.

He stands at the foot of the stairs, leaned up against one of the wooden supports on the patio, arms crossed and expression unreadable in the low light.

“Goodnight, Audrey Parker,” he calls up after her.

She loves him a little for that.


End file.
